https://caspercollege.cvlcollections.org/files/original/5adf8af426f14f73f573b0c27e72ac08.pdf f1deef12d23359f99eaf844fb7c3b463 PDF Text Text Chad Hanson Take a Picture When you live in Wyoming, your home often serves as a staging area for trips to the parks of the old frontier—Yellowstone and Grand Teton. I wouldn’t have it otherwise. My wife and I enjoy acting as tour guides and outfitters. When our visits to the parks numbered in the single digits, I stood beside friends, siblings, and nephews and we stared at jagged rock formations. We fixed our eyes on sparring elk, stately herds of buffalo, and steaming azure-colored pools. We searched for adjectives to describe what we saw: serene, majestic, out-of-this-world.Then we repeated the terms wherever they were needed. -Two summers ago, something started to change. I pulled up next to a crowd of tour­ ists alongside a highway in the northeast corner ofYellowstone. Each person held an optical device. There were binoculars, spotting scopes, and telephoto lenses, each one trained on a member of the Slough Creek wolf pack that bounced and played in a field of sagebrush and prairie grasses at the base of a hill. Shutters clicked, flash units pulsed, and the onlookers produced a chorus of “oohs” and “aahs.” I like wild animals. Each year, I make a point of watching them when I’m in the parks. I’ve written countless letters to government officials and members of Congress, urging for the animals’ protection. I am committed to the presence of wolves and bears in the Greater Yellowstone region. Even so, while I stood before one of ■wildlife-watching’s most sought-after prizes, I found myself pulling away from my camera to scan the scene around me in the ditch on the side of the road. There were men and women in the group, young and old, all festooned in brightly colored clothing: hats with atypical bills, footwear made for different occasions, back­ packs with patches sewn on them, and sunglasses that gave people the look of human flies. I heard three different languages. A couple standing next to me spoke French. A family behind me shared a story in one of the Slavic tongues, and I also recognized an Asian dialect. All around me, human beings shuffled and chattered, voices rising and falling as people related to each other. A row of parked cars rested behind us, half on tar and half on gravel. Each one was chosen to say something about the owner. There were sensible Hondas, rough and tumble trucks, and perky Subarus. These people interested me more than the dark spot in my zoom lens chasing its tail through a meadow. Throngs of people fill our parks. Yellowstone receives more than three million visi­ tors every year. If you drive the park’s highways in the summer, you will notice that people and cars are the defining features of the area. For most of us, our fellow "visitors are a source of frustration. We believe our experience of nature is diminished by each person with whom we share the world. We feel romantic about solitude. We adore the image of a lone cowpuncher shifting back and forth in a saddle, his horse stepping toward the sunset. 87 �REED My friend Carl lost two wives to cancer in a span of seven years. Afterward, he bat­ tled depression. Today, he is remarried, but for a time he struggled with a deep feeling of loneliness. At the height of his condition, I watched him chase a ten-year-old out of a fishing hole so he could have it for himself. Two years ago, on the Firehole River, a mile north of Old Faithful, I watched three men gear up for fly fishing. They sat on the tailgate of a pickup truck. When they fin­ ished rigging their rods and zipping their vests, the men dispersed along the stream, far enough apart so they could not see or hear one another. Everything we’ve been taught suggests that we should put distance between ourselves and others. Then we start com­ peting. We ask, “How many did you catch?” When I fish alone, I enjoy being by myself, but when I fish with companions, I like to fish with them. In August, my friends Bear and Graham visit from Idaho. I don’t think they would mind if I called them sld bums. They work when they want. They live in peace, and they ski like high-velocity members of a Russian ballet company. They come to Wyoming in the off-season when the snow melts oh the west side of the Teton Range. They are rarely in a position to buy out-of-state fishing permits, so they leave their fly rods back at home. Therefore, we only have one rod with us when we hike along the shore of a river. It’s a perfect three-to-one ratio. We fish each bend and pocket as a team. We com­ plement each other when the fly falls gently onto the surface. We cooperate, and when we’re through, it feels like we did something together. Last spring, my wife and I set up our canvas teepee in Yellowstone’s Norris Camp­ ground on the shore of Solfatara Creek. The majority of the families there slept in trail­ ers or recreational vehicles. I took a walk through the campsites after we unloaded our gear. I noticed rigs with names hke Hornet and Predator. A pit bull growled at me through the -window of a camper van. Back at the tent, I told Lynn I expected a manufacturer to soon unveil a new flagship RV called the Leave-Me-Alone-or-I-WillKick-Your-Ass. We visit parks and nature for the seclusion. We drive through hours of traffic. Then we set up camp in beehives of activity. It’s enough to test the most garrulous and outgo­ ing of us, but we survive because we all ignore each other. This summer, I find myself sitting in a row of chairs, set up auditorium-style in the basement of a natural history museum in Seward, Alaska. The chairs are pointed toward a television set.The screen flickers with a live feed from a camera mounted on an island. Birds like gulls, loons, and puffins cover the island from the summit to the shore. The curators call the exhibit Gull Cam. It’s a popular display. As I sit in my chair, people 88 �come and go. There are no fewer than twenty people watching at a given time. Nobody says a word to anybody else. Side-by-side in our seats, each of us pretends that we are in the middle of a private visit with the animals. i thought about taking a boat to the island. I figured it might be fun to strut into the camera’s view. I wanted to duck walk back and forth, flap my elbows, shoot my neck in and out, and squawk like a seagull. I felt like showing the bird watchers that people aren’t really so bad. We’re more compelling than most of the other creatures on this Earth. By all rights, we ought to mount cameras on the corners of busy intersections and gather to watch pedestrians. If you are going to watch people in parks, you’re going to see them taking photo­ graphs. Visitors have been making images of the parks in Wyoming for more than a cen­ tury. The first Europeans to visit the area were astounded. When they saw the land sur­ rounding the Snake River watershed, they believed they had entered a place of Biblical significance. Since the rugged peaks and valleys showed no signs of cities or settlements, they assumed the landscape mimicked Eden—nature as God intended—unmarred by homes or factories or farmers’ fields. The great artists of the day flocked to the region. Painters like Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt rushed to see the grandeur. For the first time, artists began to make images VTith no human subjects. The land spoke for itself, and it captured the imagination of the railroad companies. Businessmen hoped to capitalize on westward migration, and they used pictures of forests, lakes, and wildlife to lure tourists and settlers across the Mississippi to the mountains. Their advertisements succeeded. They convinced Americans to travel west—to hunt, fish, and revel in the beauty of the surroundings. They also persuaded lawmakers to create and then protect the parks, exempting our scenery from the scars of logging, mining, and real estate development. In the same era, we became a society of employees. We began to punch time clocks during the week. In the span of two generations, a majority of us made our living by means not connected to land or animals. We worked shifts, indoors, at desks, or on assembly lines. When we were lucky, we were granted twp weeks off, and when those two weeks showed up on the calendar, we took vacations. Travel turned into a form of leisure. We invented sightseeing. Since our vacations account for a small number of our’days on this planet, we began to look for a way to commemorate the time we spent away from our jobs. Fortunately, cameras went up for sale at the same time we started to look for a way to prove that there was more to our lives than what we did for work. Ironically, composing photographs is work. For groups and nations shackled by Cath­ olic guilt and Protestant work ethics, the act of leisure is unsettling. The next time someone asks what you are doing, tell them, “Nothing,” then see how they respond. Do­ ing nothing is not an option for Americans, Germans, or the busy people of Scandinavia. Tourists from nations like ours adjust knobs, set up tripods, and click shutters as a hedge 89 �against the angst associated with spending time in unproductive ways. Picture-taking is also a way to remind ourselves that our stories contain meaningful chapters. We want to illustrate the passages so desperately that we take unnecessary risks. A half a dozen tourists are killed or injured on the South Rim of the Grand Can­ yon each year. They ignore warning signs, step onto ledges, and then fall while taking photographs. Last summer, I watched a fly fisher wrestle a brown trout to the ground on the bank of the Yellowstone River. He used his foot to pin the flopping fish on the shore, then he took a photo from above. Dry pebbles stuck to the trout’s skin. The spectacle struck me as awkward, even lamentable. The fisherman would not let the trout back into the river without proving that he owned it, temporarily. The scene reminded me of a phrase coined by Native Americans. The Ojibway describe some of us as “far-hearted.” While the vacationer struggled with the trout, his heart hved somewhere else. In the early years of the frontier, native people refused to let photographers take im­ ages of them. They thought cameras had the power to steal souls. I can see why they felt that way, but for most of us, the act of taking pictures is binding. Pho'tographs connect us to landscapes, animals, and each other. A century ago, we lived in large, extended families—three generations on the same farm or homestead. Today, small family units bustle from town to town in search of the most abundant revenue stream. In the process, we lose our sense of a place’s history or of a like-minded group of people who can help us define ourselves. So we take photo­ graphs. In a book of essays titled On Photography, Susan Sontag explains that photos came along at the right time to offer disconnected people a way to take back or establish a sense of community. When cell phones started to come with cameras, they became almost ubiquitous. But in homes with children, we still find the greatest number and widest range of cameras. You can see the intent on the faces of parents when they point a lens at their kids with a snowy peak in the background. They’re shooting a web of significance onto the siblings with the hope that the image will hold them together by bearing witness to the shared experience. Crowds gather at the base of Old Faithful six times a day. Likewise, the parking lots with scenic views of the Grand Tetons are full from June to September. We know what we’re supposed to value, and we have a good idea which photos we are supposed to carry home. There is comfort in knowing that you’ve travelled in a direction that is well-regarded by others, but this approach is not perfect. When parks become our des­ tination, travel plans turn into nothing more than strategies for collecting pictures. I like to think that travel offers more than just an opportunity to fill hard drives and kitchen drawers with images of people grinning in front of landmarks approved by society. �There are also consequences attached, to approaching life as an image. The camera shapes our notion of what is worth seeing. Parks are worth seeing. But what about the land and animals that fall outside the boundaries of parks? When we decide that one landscape or animal species is worth our attention, in the same step we are deciding that others are unworthy. For example, some species are considered majestic when they’re in the parks, but they become pests if they happen to walk outside the lines.The buffalo ofYellowstone serve as a case in point. Buffalo don’t know what we’re up to when we define and redefine the land according to our whims. We can stand with our feet on either side ofYellowstone’s northern bor­ der. We can look to the left, and call what we see there a park.Then we look to the right and say, “Grazing allotment, measured in animal units per month.” Buffalo don’t know the difference, so they wander into Montana toward the end of December, We attempt to haze them back into the park by helicopter, but if the choppers don’t scare them into Wyoming, the creatures are destroyed. They’re killed because some of them carry an infection called brucellosis, which can cause cows to abort their calves. The concern is that the disease could spread from buffalo to cattle. But brucellosis is not native to this continent. Livestock brought the condition with them from their homes in Spain and France, then gave the infection to the herbivores of North America. If the buffalo gave it back to them, Christians would likely call that reaping what you sow. Wyoming is a land of contrasts. Within its borders, you’ll find the last vestige of a complete, intact ecosystem: Greater Yellowstone. To the south and east, big swaths of land have been offered up as a biological and geographic sacrifice. Near the town of Pinedale, Wyoming, just an hour’s drive from Grand Teton, there lies a region where natural gas drilling pads are so numerous and so close together, the area looks like a me­ chanical pincushion. T& the north and east, coal mines ravage the land. In the Thunder Basin, we dug an open pit so deep and wide its scale rivals the river canyons of the West. Tourists don’t visit Thunder Basin, Photographs are not taken. Nobody wants to re­ turn from a vacation with a picture of a strip mine or a drilling rig. So the gas fields remain out of sight. Open pits don’t cross our minds, and the aerial image ofWyoming keeps changing. People from all over the world snap photos inside the borders ofYel­ lowstone and Grand Teton, satisfied that we live in a kind of earthly paradise. Mean­ while, the gears of industry turn the rest of the state into an outdoor factory. The United States is a new nation compared to places like Japan. The Japanese love nature as much as they love economic growth. They live in urban apartments. They work long hours in corporate offices. Then they go home to bonsai trees, tiny reminders of nature, groomed to strict cultural standards. Our parks are bonsai trees, islands of carefully pruned organic matter, floating in a sea of mechanization. Life in our national parks has changed, even in the short history since white people 91 �REED settled the West, The first European visitors carried shotguns and rifles. We carry cam­ eras. Our relationship with the scenery is different today. When the parks were first established, we felt intimidated by nature—wild animals, brutal winter storms, and hostile Indians. People turn to guns when they’re afraid, but we don’t have much to fear anymore. Everybody knows that we not only tamed the natural world, we beat it into submission. Now we take photographs. We take pictures when we feel sentimental. Photos of the shrinking glaciers on the Grand Tetons are nostalgic. The Ucross Ranch is an artist’s retreat east of the Big Horn Range in Northern Wyo­ ming, In the fall of 200S, the organization commissioned a series of photographs. They paid twelve artists to take pictures of the natural gas pumping stations in the Powder River basin, an area of sage flats, rolling hills, and rugged breaks formerly untouched by roads or fences or buildings. When the photographers finished, the Ucross Foundation presented the images in the form of a travelling exhibit. They titled the work “The New Gold Rush. In the two years that followed, the pictures appeared in museums across the West. “The New Gold Rush” was scheduled to appear in Casper’s largest art museum in the fall of 2006. Two weeks prior to the opening, the gallery’s director, announced that they would not host the exhibit after all. Public galleries depend on donations to run programs and manage their affairs. In Wyoming, the most generous donors earned their fortunes in the new gold rush—the rush to turn the nation’s last remaining tracts of wide-open space into gas drilling operations. Images are powerful. When the local newspaper covered the museum’s decision to keep patrons from seeing the photos, I thought, The artists that made these prints are dangerous. The/re like a dozen Pancho Villas with adjustable lenses. Last year, the Federal Government went through a process of planning for the future of the Bighorn National Forest. I packed my camera and headed to the mountains. My luck, the balsam roots were blooming. The waters sparkled and a fresh coat of diamonds covered the glaciers. I sent the pictures to the Director of Planning, along with a note that said. See what you 11 ruin you allow logging in here? Did I influence the outcome of the Forest Service plan? Judging from the final report, I would have to say no. But I’m just one guy with an old Nikon and two semesters’ worth of art classes. Can you im­ agine all the potential in the cameras spread around this country in the summertime? This year, I started taking photographs of people taking photographs in Yellowstone. 92 � Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Print Magazine Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Take a Picture Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <div id="dublin-core-rights" class="element"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div id="dublin-core-rights" class="element"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div id="dublin-core-rights" class="element"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div id="dublin-core-rights" class="element"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text"> <div class="element-text"> <div class="element-text"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text"><a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/</a></div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Chad Hanson Language A language of the resource ENG Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Chad Hanson Journal Publications, CCA 04.ii.e.2025.01 WyCaC US. Casper College Archives and Special Collections. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context CCA 04.ii.e.2025.01_ChadHansonPapers_63 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Searchable PDF Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <em>Reed Magazine</em> is published by San José State University